Readings for 04/15/10

Hillocks’s “What Works in Teaching Composition: A Meta-analysis of Experimental Treatment Studies” was published in 1984 and, when I noticed that date, I was afraid the material it covered would be just as dated. In any case, this essay, as its title suggests, looks at what it terms “experimental treatments” as regards composition studies in order to get a sense of what does and what doesn’t work from a pedagogical perspective in the classroom. Instruction methods tracked in the course of the study include: presentational (where the teacher presents knowledge and expects students to soak it up), natural process (makes use of such things as free writing and peer reviewing with fairly minimal teacher involvement), environmental (teacher direction is specific and oriented toward student production of specific tasks, but teacher involvement is still minimal), and individual (where instruction is tailored to individual students through various means). Findings of the study include that the presentational pedagogy is the least effective at teaching writing to students yet, at the same time, it is the most prevalent pedagogy used in the classroom, while the most effective pedagogy is environmental. Another finding was that teaching of grammar in the composition classroom rarely proves effective. This study seems to me like a rather laborious way of getting to a point that seems like common sense to me: that a composition pedagogy needs to be multivalent and accommodating rather than narrowly-focused and draconian. But that’s just me.

In “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories,” Berlin examines, briefly and succinctly, four major schools of thought on composition pedagogy: those of the “Neo-Aristotelians or Classicists, the Positivists or Current-Traditionalists, the Neo-Platonists or Expressionists, and the New Rhetoricians” (766). (In regards to the latter category, I am left wondering if the term New Rhetoricians ever caught on and if it is in current/general use. Nevertheless, it’s a nice steal from Greenblatt’s New Historicism.) The Neo-Aristotelian approach uses logic/reason on data in order to get at the truth; in this system, a sign = a thing unproblematically. The Current-Traditional approach is a means of getting at truth by what is observable or what is empirical, and it, Berlin notes, dominates composition instruction (or, at least it did in the 1980s when he wrote this essay). The Expressionist approach is a Platonic approach that seeks for truth but is suspicious that language can ever express said truth because language is prone to error and instability. Perhaps because Berlin himself, as he admits readily, is a proponent of the New Rhetorical approach to composition pedagogy, his comments on the other three approaches seem derogatory. Be that as it may, he notes that the New Rhetorical approach embraces the idea that truth “is dynamic and dialectical” and that “data must always be interpreted—structured and organized—in order to have meaning” (774). Given this idea, New Rhetoric invites and encourages students to become the creators of meaning rather than merely passive receptors of “knowledge” imparted to them by their teachers. With the way Berlin presents it, New Rhetoric seems like an incredibly idealistic pedagogy. But the idea of creating meaning through interpretation appeals to me as a composition instructor, especially one like myself attempting to work with queer theory and the discourse(s) of heteronormativity in the classroom. It seems the best way to teach students how to deal with the discursive world in which we live.

As its title suggests, Fulkerson’s article looks at the state of composition pedagogy at the turn of the 21st century. Fulkerson seems convinced that composition pedagogy at the (mostly) present time has turned toward social theories, critical/cultural studies approaches. Given, once again, my interest in bringing queer theory into the composition classroom, this part of Fulkerson’s essay was particularly interesting. On this subject, although Fulkerson attempts to maintain a dispassionate or disinterested ethos, I found this part of his survey subtly biased against CCS approaches to teaching composition. Fulkerson’s main fear with CCS approaches seems to be that they do not foster teaching students how to write or what (undefined) good writing is—in favor of an agenda- or politically-driven pedagogy aimed at teaching students how to resist Western society’s dominant discourses (inclusive of patriarchy, capitalism, heterosexuality, racism, etc.). Fulkerson does raise a good point: if you’re going to use a CCS approach in the composition classroom, how are you going to make sure that composition remains a primary focus, as well? And that is something I feel I need to take into account as I develop my own queer composition pedagogy. In any case, after surveying Contemporary Expressivist Composition, Process and Post-Process theories, and Rhetorical Approaches to Composition, Fulkerson concludes that the composition classroom has, in the ten years between 1990 and 2000, become a far more complex place for professors and students alike to negotiate successfully (and this is particularly true with the seeming prevalence of CCS approaches to pedagogy that have manifest in those ten years). Hard to disagree with him there.

In their article, Downs and Wardle argue for changing the First Year Composition Course into an Introduction to Writing Studies course, a move, they claim, would allow composition and composition instructors to take their rightful place within the academy. This would be because, they insist, Writing Studies would move composition away from a one-size-fits-all and skills-based approach to the teaching of writing and toward something more rigorous and recursive. This is an intriguing approach to composition pedagogy that offers a number of elements that seem to be compatible with incorporating CCS (like queer theory) into the composition classroom. I was particularly impressed with Downs and Wardle’s insistence that their Introduction to Writing Studies course would accord full respect to students by refusing to make or give in to the persistent differentiation between student and expert writers. And, finally, in “Post-Process ‘Pedagogy’: A Philosophical Exercise,” Breuch makes explicit the fact that post-process pedagogy is much more than a critique of process pedagogy; post-process pedagogy is, in fact, aligned with notions of writing being an indeterminate range of related activities and demands engagement in the various discourse communities we all find ourselves caught up in (whether we realize it or not).